Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future. The words of Coco Chanel are a great way to start this article by Carl Pickhardt
Have you ever wondered why the young people of this generation drive so fast, as if they are forever late, or that the devil himself is hard on their heels? Do you wonder why they continue breaking the curfew and seem to act as if they did nothing wrong? Ever wondered why they would argue with you until you drop?
Young people can push your understanding way beyond your imagination, and sometimes it might seem they are putting you to the test.
What's with this insubordinate streak?
Emotional Detachment When Parenting Adolescents. More emotional intensity between parent and teenager is part of adolescence is published by Carl E. Pickhardt, Ph.D. in Surviving (Your Child's) Adolescence
Detachment Parenting of adolescents (more letting go), as contrasted with Attachment Parenting of children (more holding on,) has two components for the adults to adjust to -- social and emotional. Although neither adjustment is easy, the second can be most challenging to do.
Social Detachment means that parents have to start allowing increased freedom to grow, coupled with letting the young person learn from experience (from facing the unhappy consequences of unwise choices, for example) to become more responsibly self-reliant and independent. It can be tough for parents to let go and not protect.
Because they care so much and are so sensitively involved, parents can find Emotional Detachment more complex. This complexity is increased with the onset of adolescence when it’s easier for both teenager and parent to grow more emotionally intense, and their relationship as well. Why more intense?
On the adolescent side there are the loss of childhood security, more separation from parents, the hormonal changes of puberty, the exciting but scary exposure to and experimentation with older experiences, and the social pressures associated with creating and maintaining place among a new family of friends.
On the parent side, there is greater worry from more ignorance about their adolescent’s life, there is more fear of worldly risks and dangers, there is stress from less command and control than they had with the child, and there is more friction as their authority is increasingly questioned and contested for the sake of adolescent independence.
For both parents and teenager, adolescence is a more bruising time when it is easier to feel impatient, frustrated, anxious, offended, or hurt in the relationship. Each party has occasion to get more emotional, and getting more emotional is more at risk of losing the accurate perspective on which emotional detachment depends. The question is: whose feelings belong to whom?
Managing emotional detachment can create two pitfalls: Enmeshment of Feelings and Attribution of Feelings. On the parental side, take them one at a time.
ENMESHMENT OF FEELINGS
Seeing their adolescent sad or mad or hurt, parents often want to empathize to provide emotional support. So when their teenager loses a best friend, or girlfriend or boyfriend, they feel sadness in response to the teenager’s grief at loss. They keep their teenager sensitive emotional company this way.
What parents have to beware here is that Empathy does not become Enmeshment which would begin if they shared in their child’s response: “What happened to you feels like it happened to me.” At this point their own hurt feelings are as much in play as those of the teenager who may feel implicated in their sadness and under emotional obligation to comfort them, when all she or he wanted was their support.
Or in response to their teenager’s quickly changing moods, parents can become emotionally enmeshed when they ride the emotional roller coaster of their teenager’s highs and lows, good days and bad days, allowing the young person’s emotional life to become their own. “We can’t stand seeing her unhappy without feeling unhappy too. Then the only way to cheer ourselves up is getting her to feel better.”
Or consider another common example: when an adolescent, who is on the receiving end of bullying at school, reports victim feelings to parents who, identifying with their teenager, feel victimized themselves. “What was done to our child has been done to us and we won’t be mistreated this way!” Better to keep their own sense of injury separate from the mistreated child who has enough to emotionally deal with already. The young person doesn’t need the problem of injured parents at home on top of the problems of social cruelty at school.
ATTRIBUTION OF FEELINGS.
Sometimes parents, instead of holding on to responsibility for their own emotions, blame their feelings on the actions of their adolescent. “Our child’s moodiness and unpredictability is driving us crazy!” “Our teenager’s self-preoccupation makes so angry!” “Living around this adolescent explosiveness makes us feel anxious all the time!” “The way our teenager tears up the family makes everyone else unhappy!’
On the one hand, it is good for them to use their feelings to locate the teenage actions to which they are responding. This way, they have a focus of concern to address. What is not good, however, is when they attribute their feelings to the adolescent’s actions – a false attribution that both empowers the adolescent and disempowers the parents in an unhealthy way. Now they have just given control of their emotions to the teenager. By blaming that young person for how they feel, they have put their emotions in the teenager’s charge.
When parents vilify the adolescent for causing their unhappy feelings (“He’s makes us so unhappy!”) they do double damage. First, through casting blame parents burden the adolescent with criticism and guilt; and second they victimize themselves by giving the teenager ruling power over their emotional lives. This is a losing proposition all the way around.
Better for them to hold on to emotional responsibility: “How our adolescent chooses to act is up to her; how we choose to emotionally respond to her behavior is up to us. She has no power to make us feel one way or another. That is always our decision. We are free to decide not to feel driven crazy, not to get angry, or not to become anxious. Blame hurts us all.”
Maintaining emotional detachment during their daughter or son’s adolescence can be very challenging to do -- not becoming Enmeshed with the young person’s feelings and making them their own, and not Attributing (through blame) their unhappy feelings to how the young person is behaving. For their sake, and for that of their teenager, practicing Emotional Detachment is well worth the effort.
EXPRESSING EMPATHETIC CONCERN
All this said: expressing empathetic concern when the adolescent is going through a time of undue stress or painful loss, feeling what it must be like for your teenager so they know they are not alone can be a powerful emotional support. I think the guidelines for parents providing this in-depth caring for a young person in need of such close company are two.
First, parents need to recognize that sustained emotional support can be expensive to give. As the teenager unloads to feel better, the parent can load up, run down, and feel worse. So second, to be with their adolescent who is going through a period of extended suffering, it is usually wise for the caring parent to take good care of themselves. They can do this by getting outside company from another family member, close friend, support group, or counselor to confide in, to ease the burden of their care giving role.
So: don’t ride the roller coaster of your teenager’s emotions; don’t blame your feelings on the teenager; and if choosing to give sustained emotional support, make sure you have enough emotional support yourself to support detachment, so you can afford the cost.
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For more about parenting adolescents, see my book, “SURVIVING YOUR CHILD’S ADOLESCENCE,” (Wiley, 2013.) Information at: http://www.carlpickhardt.com
